Inspiring Castles and Towers

These fortified structures that popped up throughout Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages, have impressed and amazed people for generations. These impressive constructions were built for centuries and many are still left for us to see. These structures have resulted in many a photo-manipulations, sketches, and illustrations. In this showcase we're going to take a look at some impressive pieces of art featuring castles and towers that we've handpicked from the community over at DeviantART. Please enjoy!

The artist impressively stippled this one for a school project over a period of approximately two weeks. Stippling basically means that this entire image is made up of tiny dots. The reference photo for this was the German castle, Neuschwanstein and the project was for a wine label.

The somewhat unusual color-scheme for the sky and clouds gives a warmer tone and almost a fairytale look. The sky looks like a shell surrounding the floating castle, and a planet peaks through, accompanied with a few beams of light.

This castle, the Himeji-Jo is considered the finest surviving example of 17th century Japanese castle architecture. This 3-layer linocut print has a nice perspective, clean lines and almost looks like vector art.

This digital painting is done in around 25-30 hours using Photoshop. The model for this piece is the castle Moszna in Poland, a fairly young castle with it's 100 years. The snow gives a great contrast to the castle, and the artist's eye for detail has truly given an impressive end-result.

This fantasy-style Photoshop painting was made in an unbelievable 8 hours. The colors are nice and vibrant and give a great contrast between warm and cold in the image. The silhouette in the foreground gives it all a much bigger dimension.

Inspired by the Lord of The Ring Triology, Canadian artist Frederic St-Arnaud created this image. The cold overall tone in the image is brilliantly accompanied by the golden in the grass and on the towers.

This rough castle concept was made for a music clip for a girl-band. This castle would be modeled and rendered in 3D media and added to real scene. The artist has come up with a nice mix of Asian architecture and a classic gothic temple style. It does give some association to the Emerald City (The Wizard of Oz) and the choice of greens and blues are a nice contrast to the orange details.

This photo-manipulation has a lot of work behind it. The dragon at the bottom alone took around a day to make by using mostly elements from bats, adding some lizard and eagle as well. A well-made piece that takes advantage of a very interesting angle as well.

This one's a rework of one of the artist's early oil paintings. The castle against the sky and the moon gives a very classic look. The color scheme used gives a magic atmosphere, and notice the details and persons in the foreground that may be telling their own story.

The artist speed-painted this castle in Photoshop for a beer label. Both the use of light and shadows and the vibrant colors stand out to make this a very nice one for our collection. The unique shadow style adds that extra little signature that makes it all unique.

This surreal drawing was drawn out using pencils (2B through 6B). A very creative drawing that challenges our perception. The work is well done through the added reflections, shadow and light and a powerful sky. According to the artist this one took about a month to finish.

This piece looks like something from a rather scary story and beautifully unites an almost cartoon-like sketched style and the darker and more realistic. The perspective and composition works well, along with the light from the top right and the many added details.

A 1.5 hour speed painting of a tower/castle construction in an alien world. A dark, yet warm atmosphere, along with the blurred foreground elements gives you a feeling of actually being there. An interesting and different piece with a great angle that was painted in amazingly short time.

Tutorials

Do you feel inspired and want to make a fantasy-style artwork with castles and towers on your own? Finally, we've put together a few tutorials for you to have a closer look at to get some inspiration and maybe even polish some of your skills.

This tutorial was featured here on our site back in July of 2009. Check it out now to see how you can create your own effect very much like the floating islands you've seen in several of the previous artworks.

You can find this tutorial at the PSD-dude website. Using both photo-manipulation techniques and some illustration skills, you'll get a very nice result.

Conclusion

There are so many great artists out there, using both digital and more traditional art forms to express themselves. In this article we've seen a variety of approaches when it comes to using such well-known elements as towers and castles. These buildings are familiar to all of us and we see them as landmarks, playing the leading role in art and as parts of scenes in fairytales and in history. We hope you've enjoyed this collection and would love to hear your feedback!